


but what if it's you

by endquestionmark



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 00:36:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10686156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: Nic is in the kitchen when Amalia kisses Alex, walks out of the living room and backs her up against the wall in the hallway next to the side table where Nic leaves his keys and the pile of shoes he always means to organize and all of their coats, hanging from a row of hooks, and there she presses her mouth to Alex’s, her beautiful laughing soft mouth, and Alex kisses her back.





	but what if it's you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starstrung](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/gifts).



> This is set vaguely after Ep. 207 ("Personal Possessions") and therefore contains canon-compliant trust issues all round, to say nothing of Alex's mental state and bonus Schrödinger's demonic influences. Blame, credit, and very belated well-wishes to [Mari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung), the tallest of Pauls.

Taking some space and time away from Amalia, both for the sake of the investigation and their friendship, sounds good on air and in theory, but it’s a little harder to pull off when everybody at the studio practically lives in each other’s pockets. Alex does her best, but she’s only willing to walk up five flights of stairs so many times to avoid an awkward elevator ride. The fourth time she staggers through Nic’s office door and practically frisbees a tray of coffee at his face, he looks up from his computer and shifts his headphones off one ear. “Thanks.” He looks at the tray. “Do we have guests?”

Alex blinks, and realizes she’s left the tray full. “No,” she says. “The other three are mine.”

“Okay,” Nic says, and Alex braces herself, because she knows that tone of voice. Nic uses it when he’s about to be right about something and he knows she won’t like it. “So I take it you aren’t feeling better.”

A few weeks ago Alex might have shaken her head, said _no_ and saved her tears for a private moment, but she’s too tired for that. Instead she just shrugs. It is what it is. She doesn’t think anything is likely to change any time soon. “I’ll manage.”

She expects Nic to fold, the way he usually does when she pushes back, but instead he just looks at her for a moment. “I know you’re handling this yourself, so I just want to be clear this is a suggestion,” Nic says finally. He must sense Alex’s contrarian tendencies kicking into high gear, because he adds: “And one I’m making as your friend, not your producer.”

Alex gives him a wary half-nod.

“Come and sleep on my couch for a couple of days,” he says. “See if the change of scenery helps. If it doesn’t, you can still make fun of my Kickstarter closet of shame.”

“You still have that?” Alex says. One of her few reliable joys in life is making fun of Nic’s hallway closet, which is stuffed with prototypes and products so esoteric as to be completely useless, all acquired because Nic feels an inexplicable obligation to support crowdfunding as a concept and has a chronic inability to say no to an interesting pitch. “Amalia didn’t go in with a shovel?”

“Very subtle. No, she didn’t,” Nic says. “And I talked to her just in case, and she says it would be fine with her. Not like you listen to her more than me or anything, but you definitely do. And I’m—” He hesitates. “Look, you know I’m not saying this to guilt you or as a reflection on your work, right? Because I’m not.”

“Okay,” Alex says. She crosses her arms, drumming her fingers against her elbow. “You’re making me nervous here.”

“Sorry,” Nic says, and laughs under his breath. “I guess that’s counterproductive. I just meant to say — I’m worried, that’s all. And I want to help.”

 _Jesus,_ Alex thinks. On the one hand, it means more than she can express. On the other, she would do literally anything to keep Nic from worrying about her, and she knows he would do the same. “All right,” she says, because she doesn’t know how else to make it better, but also because she misses the easy intimacy that they’ve lost since she first piloted a show about interesting people and occupations that has since changed and grown to occupy all the space between them. “Just for a few days.”

Nic smiles. “Great,” he says, and Alex manages to keep up her smile until she’s safely in her office, door closed behind her.

She keeps it up for a few minutes after that, just in case somebody saw her come in and wants to talk to her, but when nobody does, Alex lets her expression slide into blankness. _None of this would have come up if I’d left those coffees in the hall,_ she thinks. At least Nic doesn’t know how many times she’s gotten away with buying extra coffees and sneaking them into her office before dropping off his. That would be worse.

Alex knows it’s ridiculous. She knows she should be talking to somebody about it instead of committing amateur subterfuge every time she starts to fall asleep at her desk, but she has a feeling Dr. Bernier would make noises about how enough caffeine has probably accumulated in her system to keep her from sleeping for the next five years, and Alex has to draw the line somewhere. She might be willing to give up Twitter before bed but cutting out coffee is a step too far.

Anyway, she thinks, Nic said it wasn’t a reflection on her work, and that’s what really matters. As long as she can do her job, and do it as well as she usually would, what else is there to worry about? The show is coming out on schedule, and Alex has enough material to keep working on episodes even if she has an off day — an off week — and can’t pull herself together to record anything new, not even a phoner with some industry expert who would be happy to talk her ear off without much prompting. Not that she needs it, again, but just in case: Alex has it.

If she told Nic, he would give her that look, like he’s worried but doesn’t want to bring it up in case that makes things worse. Instead she keeps it saved on her desktop, labeled clearly and organized into folders by episode. Alex doesn’t have much scheduled for the afternoon — some bridge segments to record, a few phone recordings to clean up — so she spends the last few hours of the day drifting, eyes only half-focused on the screen as she edits by rote. When she looks up from the last track, Nic is standing in her office door. Alex looks at her desk phone by reflex, assuming that she must have missed something. “What?”

“I’m driving you back to your place so you can pack a bag,” Nic says.

Alex frowns. “I can drive.”

“I know you can,” Nic says. “But I’ve been standing here for five minutes, Alex. I called your name. Twice.”

She looks at her headphones, hanging on the joint in her gooseneck desk lamp, and then back to Nic. “Oh.”

“Oh,” he agrees. “Give me a shout when you’re done.”

Alex shuts down her computer. “Done,” she says, and gives him a quick smile, hoping it looks more reassuring than it feels.

“All right,” he says, matching it with one of his own.

She hopes so.

 

* * *

 

Alex’s apartment isn’t particularly messy. It just looks more lived-in than usual, because she keeps leaving dishes in the drying rack and mail on the side table instead of actually putting anything away. Alex doesn’t bother to take her shoes off, heading straight for the bedroom, but Nic leaves his on the mat before he follows, pausing in the doorway. It takes her a minute to realize that he’s looking at the assortment of mugs on her nightstand. “Oh,” she says. “Yeah.”

“Are you done with these?” he says, and Alex feels abjectly grateful, because it’s such an easy question.

“Oh, I think so,” she says. “Unless there’s coffee left in any of those.”

Nic inspects them. “No, I don’t think so.” He starts hanging them off his fingers. “Mind if I wash these out?”

Alex shrugs — they’ll just be back on the counter in a week — but Nic takes it as assent, and disappears into the takeout-littered wreckage of her kitchen.

As she stuffs clothes into a duffel bag, she can hear water running and the faint sound of Nic humming as he scrubs. It doesn’t help much, not with exhaustion constantly gnawing at her, but it’s something. Having somebody else around, going about the minutiae of an ordinary life, reminds Alex that the world ticks on as usual outside her particular obsessive rabbit hole.

She makes a quick detour into the bathroom for her toothbrush and deodorant, because much as she enjoys making flagrant use of other people’s toiletries Alex gets the sense it’s the kind of thing that might come across as out of line to somebody’s — whatever Amalia is to Nic. If Alex could figure that out, she thinks it might help her feel a little less off-balance, but on the other hand she shouldn’t care. It isn’t about her. Just because Nic and Amalia have something between them doesn’t mean she has any less. Nic is still her friend and producer, and Amalia is the same tour de force who once came up to Alex at a work party, years ago when she had no idea who Amalia was beyond her relationship to Nic, and nodded at the unfortunate acquaintance Alex had brought as a sort of buffer for the kind of people who come to podcast studios for the conversation.

“You’re with him?” Amalia hadn’t looked at the guy — who Alex desperately regretted inviting, but couldn’t bring herself to abandon — once.

“Hi,” Alex said, and while she was trying to figure out how to politely say _yes but I’d prefer not to be_ , he’d interrupted.

“Yeah,” he said, and Alex gave him a tight smile.

Amalia had narrowed her eyes. “Okay,” she said. Then she’d leaned in and slipped her arm through Alex’s, like it was just the two of them and some asshole who’d barged into a private conversation. “First of all, you could do so much better. Second—” She angled Alex away, so deftly that she almost didn’t notice. “—Nic is out in the hallway waiting for us so we can go to a bar, except he doesn’t know you’re coming yet because he’s scared we won’t get along, so I think we’ll get on fine. Are you coming?”

 _Jesus,_ Alex had thought. _No wonder Nic likes her._ “How could I resist?” she said, and that was worth it for Nic’s expression alone when he saw them come out of the party arm in arm.

Alex realizes that she’s staring into the mirror and looks down. For a moment she can’t place the sound of running water, since the sink is dry, but then she remembers. Nic is in her kitchen, washing her dishes and waiting for her to get her shit together. Alex rubs at her eyes and winces; it just makes her look more tired.

Outside, the sky is low in a way that promises close, heavy fog, but no rain. It deadens the sound of her door closing, the clunk of the lock, and then Nic pulls away from the curb and the world narrows down to what she can see through the windshield.

Bridge traffic is bad, so instead of watching the queasy stop-start rhythm in the next lane over, Alex leans her head against the window and lets her eyes slip out of focus. Nic always has the heater on — something to do with bad circulation — and it’s the closest Alex has felt to the kind of exhaustion that makes her head feel heavy, as if she could sink into a deep sleep at any moment. No last-minute panic jerking her back to alertness, no endless series of thoughts demanding her attention, just the vague awareness that at some point soon she’ll have to shake herself awake and get out of the car. She keeps falling asleep, or almost asleep, and then jolting back.

“We’re probably going to be here a while,” Nic says, fingers tapping on the steering wheel. “You want to listen to something?”

“What time is it?” Alex says.

Nic squints at the clock. “Quarter to six? About.”

She doesn’t even have to think about it. “Sure, but we have to turn it off before Marketplace.”

“All right,” Nic says, laughing, and turns on the radio. “If we’re still stuck here by then, we might have bigger problems.”

“Not a chance.” Alex yawns. “We’ll be here until the Takeaway.”

“No need to sound so grim about it.” Nic fiddles with the volume. “Personally — I know, I know. Look — I just think it’s kind of cool to have a less pre-packaged program on the air. And you have to admit it’s found its feet in the last few years.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Years. God, remember when it went on for hours and hours a day?”

“Alex,” Nic says, and she grins.

“It did!”

“It did, and so would you if you could.”

“Would not,” she says. “I’d run out of things to say sooner or later.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Nic says.

Alex falls asleep, or at least stops listening, sometime in the D segment, in the middle of a feature — appropriately — on neural plasticity, a long story running over what would usually be local commentary. She only drifts back when Nic cuts the engine and gives her a look that plainly says: _Please don’t make me wake you up_.

“Tell me I didn’t miss anything,” she says, undoing her seatbelt.

“No,” Nic said. “No driveway moments. Come on, you’ll end up with neck cramp.”

Alex gets out of the car into fine mist, the sort that beads on her eyelashes and makes her itch for a towel. “No, don’t,” she says, when Nic opens the trunk, and watches him tilt very slowly to the side as he tries to lift her bag. “Want a hand?”

“I’m _fine_ ,” he insists. “Tell me this isn’t all hard drives.”

Alex looks at nothing in particular. “It’s hard drives and clothes?”

“Right,” Nic says, and finally gets it onto his shoulder. Alex swears she can see his frame distorting under the strain. “Well, you’ll have to get the door.”

 

* * *

 

Every time Alex sees Nic’s apartment, it looks different, like a dorm room if it had only one occupant over the course of five years. Alex has known him longer than that, and so she can say with certainty that the only consistent property of any space Nic occupies is that he never expects that anybody else might ever have to exist in it. In the first year that she’d known him, and spent far too many mornings hungover on his sofa, Alex had encountered unopened mail on the top shelf of his fridge, an opened box of rechargeable batteries in the microwave, and a sticky note on the bathroom mirror that said only: _LIGHT_.

“Well, the light went out, but I only remember it when I’m in the same room, so it’s there to remind me to get new bulbs,” Nic had said, when Alex asked. “And it only really matters at night, since I get enough light in the mornings.”

The batteries were likewise in the microwave so that he remembered to recharge them, Alex remembers, assuming he didn’t burn the place down first while trying to heat up soup. Nic had never explained the unopened mail to her satisfaction, but she suspects it had something to do with invisible ink.

At present, his apartment is fairly presentable, though Alex has no doubt there are sticky notes lurking just under the surface. She also suspects that Amalia has exerted a certain influence on the more visible aspects of Nic’s eccentricity, because his piles of books are confined to tables and only one arm of the sofa. She leaves her bag near the other and does her customary inspection of the corkboards that take up the walls not occupied by bookshelves. Most of the notes Nic has pinned up are indecipherable, between his handwriting — just as it never occurs to him that other people might need to be able to navigate his apartment, it never occurs to Nic that other people might need to read what Alex would generously describe as his scrawl — and the sheer mass of material. Nic never commits to anything halfway; he jumps from one total immersion experience to the next. Sometimes Alex wishes she could live in his head, if only for a few days at a time, but walking around his living room is the next best thing.

“So,” she says, without turning around. “Delivery? We can get those drunk man noodles you like.”

“Sure,” Amalia says, and Alex wheels around in surprise. “Or we could get something to eat that you won’t wince your way through. Hello, Alexandra.”

Alex remembers abruptly that she’s the third wheel. It feels like coming home and finding that her parents have turned her old room into storage. “Hi,” she says. “Amalia. How are you?”

“I’m well.” Amalia is barefoot and barelegged, wrapped in a robe Alex remembers from a weekend well-spent in the bottom of a case of prosecco, coming up with concepts for shows that would never have made it to pilot. “I suppose I shouldn’t ask.”

“I’m sure you can guess.” Alex smiles tightly and goes to sit by her bag, hands tucked under her thighs so that she doesn’t do anything stupid with them, for example ripping a hole in the upholstery. “Sorry, I know I’m—” Unable to gesture, she shrugs. “I wouldn’t have agreed, but you know how Nic gets. And I guess he’s not wrong. This time, anyway. Probably.”

“Alexandra,” Amalia says, and sits on the arm of the sofa. Her robe whispers aloud, riding up a little, but Alex keeps her gaze resolutely on the opposite wall until Amalia puts a finger under her chin, tips her face up, tucks a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. No matter how much they fight, how angry they might be with each other, there’s always that. Alex can find her way back to friendship with most people she’s slept with, but not Amalia. No matter how many years pass, it always seems to be caught between them, an ember in her throat that lights Alex up with the same attraction she felt the first time Amalia made her feel like the only interesting person in the world. “Nobody, least of all Nic, could make you do something you didn’t think was a good idea.”

 _You don’t know that,_ Alex wants to say. _I do things I think are bad ideas all the time._ That isn’t Amalia’s fault, though. It’s nobody’s fault that all Alex’s leads are just turning up new questions, and that she can’t tell if Strand wants to help or if he wishes they’d never started looking into his work to begin with, and that all of it just gives Alex more to think about at night, when she can’t sleep, when she feels like she might go out of her mind with exhaustion. “I guess,” she says. “Still. Sorry.”

Amalia makes Alex look her in the eye. “No more emails?”

“No more emails,” Alex says, but feels compelled to add: “If it was even me. I would just not check your email, to be sure. It’s the only way.”

“When my sources start using messenger pigeons, then I’ll hit inbox zero.” Amalia pats Alex’s cheek. “So. Delivery?”

“Delivery,” Alex says. “And I meant it. Thai is fine. Don’t let my wimpy taste buds dictate your habits.”

“Oh, you’ll regret that.” Amalia pulls out her phone. “See? No need to be sorry. This works.”

It only sort of works. Alex is terrible when it comes to taking work home, whether to her own or somebody else’s, and she knows that sooner or later she’ll stumble into a question that will ruin their tentative camaraderie and send them back to square one. The same qualities make her at once a good journalist and a terrible friend.

Still, she doesn’t have to keep it up forever — just for a week to see if things get better, and most of that to be spent at work, because the only thought that actually makes any of it better is the idea that Alex might get answers if she just looks harder, puts in even more hours.

Alex can manage a week, if only because she doesn’t have any other ideas left to try.

 

* * *

 

It goes well until about two in the morning, when Alex wakes up and finds herself in the odd werelit world between midnight and sunrise, when nobody is awake and reality seems more pliable than usual. She knows it won’t help if she gets up and wanders around, taking stock of the room — all the same notes and books and debris she’s already seen by daylight — in an hour that feels like it belongs to her alone, but Alex does it anyway, because it might give her something to think about other than the running thoughts that occupy her mind every other night.

The world is so quiet at night, in the strange non-time of the early morning that Alex has come to know as well as — better than — the inside of her own head. She always feels as if she’s caught between breaths, a moment of stasis before the long exhale of sunrise. Alex makes one round of the room, fingertips trailing along the spines of Nic’s books, the pitted cork and variously textured paper of his notes, and then another, watching the way the light never changes, one long tone of silvered blue. It washes the color from the room, from her skin, and makes the shadows seem shallow and safe. A third round, to hear the way Nic’s floorboards whisper underfoot, the transition to carpet, and then Alex realizes that somebody else is breathing in the doorway and her chest seizes tight with panic.

“No luck, then?” Amalia says. “Alexandra?”

Alex holds her hands up and focuses on getting her breathing under control. “Sorry,” she says. “Sorry. No — no luck.”

By then, Amalia has crossed the room. Her arm is around Alex’s waist and her hand is on Alex’s shoulder and she leads Alex to the sofa and sits her down and leans against her side. She doesn’t say anything for a while, and then murmurs: “So, that bad.” It isn't a question.

“You know it is,” Alex says, because Amalia was there. She slept in Alex’s tiny guest room while Alex wandered through the hall and the kitchen and the living room like a cut-rate Shakespearean villain, picking up dishes and putting them back down unwashed, shuffling unopened mail like a deck of cards and leaving it on the mat, sitting next to her hall table to stare sightless at the opposite wall. Maybe she’s being rude. Maybe Amalia is just trying to help. “Sorry,” she says, starting to irritate even herself. “Yeah. I mean, at least I got—” She checks her phone. “Four hours, that’s pretty good.”

“Four hours,” Amalia repeats. She tightens her grip on Alex’s waist, pulling her over to rest her head on Amalia’s shoulder. “And nothing helps?”

If anything did, Alex would be doing it. She doesn’t say that, though. Instead she looks at the slope of shadow along Amalia’s collarbone where her robe falls open, the heavy curve of her breast, and thinks that she doesn’t belong. Amalia has better things to do than spend her night nursing Alex’s inability to manage her own work-life balance. She has a life outside of the studio. She has Nic.

“No,” Alex says instead, and also doesn’t say: _You might._ She knows it isn’t fair to ask, no matter how badly she wants. She knows she doesn’t get to have — Amalia, Nic, anything that might help. Strand. She just gets so tired of fighting, sometimes, for one step forward and three back. Uncertainty is exhausting, but Alex knows that it’s what she signed up for, what she wanted so badly when she started asking questions for a living. She thought she’d be better at dealing with it. The fact that she isn’t is nobody’s problem but her own.

“All right,” Amalia says. “If I sit with you, will that help?”

Alex wants to say that it will, but she knows better. She’s tried falling asleep to white noise, videos, Ira Glass interviews; everything she can imagine might help. None of it does. It just runs through into her dreams and makes it even harder to tell the difference between waking and sleeping, the unreality of her nightmares and the way she sleepwalks through her days. “No,” she says again, and Amalia sighs and runs her fingers through Alex’s hair, working out the half-formed sleep tangles.

“Wake me up if you aren’t asleep in an hour, okay?” she says.

Her chin is almost on Alex’s shoulder. Her breath is warm against Alex’s neck, and Alex wants to turn into it, into Amalia’s mouth, her skin, her closeness. “Okay,” Alex says.

They both know that she’s lying, but Amalia still leaves her, in the half-night, to her thoughts and pacing. She goes away because Alex asked, and Alex doesn’t regret it, but she remembers how warm Amalia always is, how she always kicks off the duvet and sprawls over the bed, limbs hanging over the edge with no thought of what might be underneath. She misses it. She misses having another heartbeat in the bed to align with her own, to chase away her dreams. She misses how easy it is to fall into shared rhythms and shared spaces, with anybody but also with Amalia in particular, how good it always is, how inevitable it feels. Alex misses being anything other than a liability. She wants to remember what it’s like to be a friend, somebody to meet for a few drinks, somebody to fall into bed with; she wants to feel wanted.

An hour later, more or less — an infinity more, a few seconds less — Alex drifts into an uneasy, feverish sleep. She tosses and turns, semiconscious, until her phone alarm goes off, and then she manages another half hour of dozing before giving up and going in search of whatever experimental device Nic is using to make coffee lately.

It isn’t much of an improvement, as nights go, but it isn’t so much worse. Alex is learning to take that as a victory.

 

* * *

 

Alex is brushing her teeth the next night when Amalia knocks on the doorframe. “Mind sharing the sink?” she says. Alex nods with a mouthful of toothpaste and wishes she’d bothered to put on shorts to go with her sleep shirt. “How was your day?”

For one, Alex can’t answer, because she’s made enough of a fool of herself lately that she doesn’t actually want to cap her day off by trying to talk while foaming at the mouth. For another, it takes her a minute to remember. Most of her life seems to be reconstructed from context clues these days, pieced together after the fact from fragments of memory and secondhand accounts. She spits and rinses. “Okay,” she says. “You know, the usual. Ten percent legwork, ninety percent editing. You?”

“Just as always,” Amalia says. Her hip bumps against Alex’s as she goes up on tiptoe, swaying, to reach the floss. “Lots of emails, very few leads.” She smiles. “The usual.”

“Sure,” Alex says, towel still in her hands. She doesn’t know what Amalia is doing, making small talk like nothing has happened when it seems like she’s already picked sides. When she tells Nic details about her work that she won’t tell Alex, even when it might help clear up the questions that have come between them; when it seems like she wants to pick sides for Nic, without even offering him the choice. It shouldn’t even be one. He shouldn’t have to choose between his personal life and the story.

Alex is pretty certain that Nic would pick the story, every time, but she also knows that if he asked her for advice, she couldn’t answer without knowing that she was steering him wrong, one way or another. If she told him to pick the story, it would be selfish of her, and Alex knows that she is, but it’s not the kind of thing she likes to advertise. On the other hand, if she told Nic to let the story come second, it would feel like a betrayal: of him, of herself, of the directed professional dysfunction she’s spent her entire life cultivating; of everything that keeps her going, that drives her to keep asking questions even when she knows the answers will haunt her for the rest of her life. Either way, she doesn’t want to find out what he would choose.

Equally she doesn’t want to be rude. “So,” she says. “You and Nic.”

It isn’t a better subject of conversation or a more polite one. Alex thinks, though, that it might be the kind of question she would have asked Amalia if she weren’t so tired, so constantly close to the edge of intolerance. If Amalia can pretend that nothing has changed, then maybe she can manage it too.

“Oh, you know us,” Amalia says. “Or, well. You know Nic. He’s—” She breaks off, and Alex thinks: _Easy for a quick wit, a sharp tongue, and an overbearing personality._ “Well, we went out for drinks to catch up — remember he still owes me those 200 francs, yes? And then he invited me back because he wanted to keep talking, and then, well, you know. It’s never just talking with him.”

“Sure.” _It is with me,_ Alex doesn’t say. At least, it has been for years; she’s never had the same problem with Nic that she does with Amalia. They never had to fumble their way back to friendship, not even when Nic discovered his affinity for production rather than hosting and became the ever-present reminder in Alex’s ear, her moderating influence, her voice of reason. She doesn’t regret it: neither sleeping with Nic to begin with, nor the eventual realization that they could get on just as well — remain just as close, bordering on codependent —without sex. She misses having both, is all. Alex has a hard enough time finding people she can talk to about work, people who can keep up, before she can even consider the ones she might want to fuck. “So, is this — are you — I mean.”

“Planning to stick around?” Amalia says. She bares her teeth at the mirror and unwinds the floss from her fingers. “You know that’s not how I do things. Never make a decision based on anybody else. That’s how you end up with regrets.”

Alex is jealous, sometimes, of how Amalia and Nic seem to be able to live so lightly. She knows that she’s hurt people, that she’s caused them pain as a result of neglect or lack of consideration, and she knows that she’s prone to double-overcorrecting — first to the point of self-paralysis and then in the other direction, to the point of callousness. It would be nice to find a middle ground without agonizing, but Alex prefers to live in a way that leaves an impression. She can’t live with no fixed address, as Amalia can, and she’s never managed the trick of disappearing to live solely within her own head for days at a time, as Nic does. The fact that she’s sleeping on his sofa is ordinary enough: evidence of life, proof of existence. The fact that it seems to have become a necessity, on the other hand, means that Alex could be doing a much better job.

“You’ll have to teach me that one sometime,” Alex says. “Sounds like it might come in handy.”

“Oh, no.” Amalia takes a step back and gathers Alex’s hair into a loose handful, pulls it back over her shoulders and lets it drift free again. “Don’t you ever, Alexandra, who else could I count on to know where to get the best coffee in the city?” Her fingertips drift over Alex’s throat, the top of her spine. For just a moment, Amalia’s touch dips just below the neckline of her shirt, unexpected and almost unbearably warm.

Alex goes very still, even though she shouldn’t and knows it. She has no idea what Amalia is doing, or rather she has some idea, but that must be wrong. Amalia might have a knack for evading consequence, but she also keeps coming back to Nic. There must be some constants in her life that she isn’t willing to risk in the name of transience and experience. Surely by now Nic is one. If he isn’t: he should be.

Amalia is the one to step away, just before Alex thinks she could used to the sensation of her touch, its unfading electricity.

Maybe she’s wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Either way, Amalia’s fingerprints linger on her skin like a brand.

 

* * *

 

Alex wakes partway through the night, as usual, but falls back asleep without too much effort. In the remaining few hours of the night, however, disturbed perhaps by her blurry interlude of consciousness, she dreams. She doesn’t remember how it starts or progresses, only that it does, and that somebody is touching her; someone’s hands are warm on her bare hips; someone’s mouth is pressed to her shoulder in an open kiss, undercut with the scrape of teeth. Because it’s an id dream, the kind that never moves beyond uncomplicated physical desire, Alex doesn’t have to act on her own — she simply responds, arching into the contact, tipping her head back for more.

She gets it; the angle is awkward, but she manages a messy kiss, mostly breath and heat, before there are fingers under her chin, turning her face back to the front, and Alex knows who it is before she sees.

She’s always taken a particular satisfaction in knowing how to make Amalia gasp, and Amalia’s smile fits perfectly against her own. Alex bites down, worrying the softest part of Amalia’s lower lip between her teeth, and gets a full-body shudder for her trouble. It somehow feels like more of an accomplishment to get that kind of response from a woman than a man, and Amalia in particular, who will be off in search of the next adventure before Alex can realize how badly she’ll miss her. Anyway: Amalia presses against her and Alex wants to reach out, but her hands are held, or tied, behind her back. It doesn’t hurt, and she isn’t scared, but with her back arched and her belly bared Alex feels like a drawn bow, a raised offering. Amalia traces a line down Alex’s throat, breastbone, belly, and — she raises her hips — apex.

Alex feels like a struck chime, a single clear tone. Something is happening that she can’t see or describe, but she knows that she’s just a single part of it, a resonance waiting to be amplified, a note in search of polyphony. Amalia knows more, she thinks, but Alex doesn’t want to ask, because then Amalia might stop touching her; Amalia might go away. In lieu of touching, she allows herself to be touched, and arches back for another kiss — at a better angle, so that she gets a little more than secondhand air. Her mouth catches properly, and so she realizes that the shape is familiar, the movement; Alex knows how to kiss whoever it is, and they know what she likes as well.

The shape of it is laughter, the self-deprecating kind, but with an edge of awful irrepressible fondness. Alex knows that sound. She hears it every day.

When she wakes, the dream fades quickly, but the sense of heat — the full-body flush, the sense of vague guilt, and yet the unrepentant knowledge of her own enjoyment — does not. Alex remembers, vaguely, the sensation of being held and made to feel; she remembers making Amalia gasp, and how much she liked it.

Nic comes into the kitchen first, for a change, all bleary eyes and messy hair. Given that Alex can barely produce a cup of coffee from his supplies when fully alert, the fact that he manages it while still half-asleep at best stings a little, but caffeine goes a long way towards soothing Alex’s wounded ego. She tells him so, and Nic laughs — low and breathless and devastatingly fond — and Alex has to look away for a moment, because she remembers that too, the shape of kissing him. She hasn’t thought about it in a very long time, but she thinks about it then, watching him rub the grit from his eyes, remembering the way his laughter felt in her mouth.

When Amalia comes in, when Alex is down to the dregs of her coffee and Nic is making inquiring noises about a second cup, she moves around him with a comfort born of practiced intimacy. She and Alex used to be like that, once, as did Alex and Nic, and they still are, but this is new: the three of them, finding their way around newly inflicted fractures, still awkward. Alex doesn’t know if she can trust Amalia — with Nic, with herself, with the doubts and worries that occupy her every waking moment, not to mention more than a few besides — but she also doesn’t know if she can trust herself. She doesn’t know if she can trust anybody, but that’s a lie: there are degrees of honesty, and she can count on those.

She can count on Nic to pull her off a story when she’s in so deep that she can’t tell where the line is anymore. She can count on Amalia to throw her off balance, every time, for better or worse. She can count on herself to keep pushing, tenacious to the point of self-destructiveness, and she can count on — well. There are things Alex tries not to think about, because she can’t take them back. The degree and kind of trust that she has in Strand is one of them.

Not to mention she should be able to do her job without him there to ground her, to pull her back from the edge and remind her of the everyday realities of the millions of people who have no idea what a podcast is, let alone what hers is about. Alex got along perfectly well before, and one day she will have to get along perfectly well after, and she knows that Nic will be there — as will Amalia, in her unpredictable international way — but, at the end of the day, in the dark when she can’t sleep for waking nightmares, Alex will be alone with herself.

Amalia leans against the doorway, watching them sidelong. Alex tries not to meet her eye and fails. Nic, momentarily distracted by something in his coffee cup, looks up in the sudden stillness, bemused.

He was holding her, Alex realizes, in the dream; his hands, his mouth, his breath against her skin. There’s a plain honesty in desire, a trust implicit in touch that all the nightmares in the world can’t take away. Amalia is still watching.

For a moment, Alex thinks that she knows, that she must be able to see through Alex’s skin to her stammering pulse, her telltale heart.

Of course she doesn’t — of course it’s just a trick of the morning and the light — but one side of Amalia’s mouth curves up in a smile, and Alex could swear she hears a faint ringing.

 

* * *

 

Amalia comes to the studio with them, which means that Alex relinquishes shotgun to take up as much of the back seat as possible, on the theory that she can be just as much of a nuisance as long as she applies herself, regardless of visibility. Nic stops at a drive-through for breakfast, which Alex declines on the grounds that it’ll give her an excuse to run out for triple coffee and pastries halfway through the morning, and they catch most of the last hour of Morning Edition. Ten seconds of dead air between segments — Nic catches Alex’s eye in the rearview mirror, and she grimaces in poorly disguised pleasure. Podcasting has to come with some benefits to offset the constant refrain of “it’s digital, on-demand” that Alex has to trot out in at least one out of every three interviews. The fundamental impossibility of fucking up a live broadcast goes a long way towards settling the score.

“There but for the grace of production values,” Nic says through a mouthful of hashbrown, and Alex rolls her eyes.

“Thank you, almighty producer,” she says. “Without you all our segments would run long and nobody would ever cut to weather. How long was that last episode you cut, again?”

At least he has the decency to look sheepish. “It needed the narration to put everything in context! None of the new developments would have made sense otherwise.”

“What new developments?” Amalia leans toward Nic. “You never did tell me about your show.”

“Don’t get him started,” Alex mutters, and swings her legs up onto the seat, ignoring Nic’s dejected sigh.

“Okay,” Amalia says. “Give me the short version.”

The short version occupies them well into the first segment of the Takeaway and follows them out of the car and into the studio, where Alex abandons it in favor of wringing a liquid approximating coffee out of the dusty Keurig in the corner of their tiny kitchenette. When she reemerges, novelty mug in hand, Nic appears to have given up on brevity and moved on to the long version. Amalia is sitting at his desk, headphones over one ear, squinting at something on his monitor as if she has no idea what she’s meant to be listening for; Alex is acutely familiar with the feeling. Hopefully Nic gives Amalia a little more help, otherwise she and Alex will likely cross paths in an hour or so as both go in search of clarity by way of caffeine.

In fact, Alex doesn’t have to, because Amalia beats her to it. She knocks on the half-open door of Alex’s office with a takeout cup and a paper bag with promising grease stains. Alex looks up, fingertips pressed to her temples, and just stares for a moment. “Did I forget about something? Were we getting coffee?”

“No, no.” Amalia holds the cup up like a declaration of intent. “Can I come in?” Alex nods, and Amalia comes to lean against her desk. She sets the cup down by her hip, and Alex takes the bag before it can interfere with her meticulously curated mess. “Nic said you’ve been drinking a lot of coffee. I thought I’d make a contribution since I’m taking up your conference room.”

“Thanks?” Alex doesn’t mean for it to be a question, but she doesn’t bother to correct herself. She looks inside the bag: a lemon bar, slightly squashed, with an overenthusiastic dusting of icing sugar that already threatens to stick to her fingers and colonize her keyboard.

Amalia shrugs. “No problem.”

To her chagrin, Alex only hesitates for a moment before she reaches for the coffee. It might be an overt peace offering, or a clumsy attempt at ingratiation, but if Alex is going to share space with Amalia anyway then they may as well agree to a truce. Not to mention that, one way or another, Alex is going to need at least two more to get through the day. She may as well start accepting charitable donations.

Halfway through the lemon bar, she realizes that she should offer Amalia some, but she looks up to find herself alone in the room.

Alex licks icing sugar from her fingers and tries to wipe the remainder away on her palms. When she opens her hands, there are dusty white prints, sticky-sweet; Alex thinks of Amalia’s touch on her bare shoulders, her fingertips bright against Alex’s nape. For a moment, she thinks that she’s remembering her dream, then realizes: no, it was real. It was in Nic’s bathroom. Alex can recall the taste of toothpaste, the cold tile underfoot, Amalia’s nearness, and the brush of her hip.

Amalia seems to be annexing her life, a piece at a time, growing brighter and more real as Alex slips further and further into the shadows. It reminds her of a nightmare she had often as a child, of coming home to find another Alex in her place, doing a better job of living her life than she ever could. Alex feels as if she’s been pulled through to the wrong side of the looking glass and trapped there as a reflection, a poor imitation of the person she could be, while the world carries on without even noticing the difference.

She doesn’t know what to do about it, which isn’t new — more often than not, Alex is making it up as she goes along — but she feels as if she ought to do something, make some effort to hold onto the life she used to take for granted, the friendships that used to keep her moored. But then, again, she has no idea what to do.

Maybe Amalia would know. Maybe Alex should ask her.

On the other hand, maybe Amalia would have no idea what Alex was talking about. Or — and Alex knows that she should be able to let go of her pet theories in the face of new evidence, but she can’t help but wonder — maybe Amalia would lie to her.

Alex knows that she shouldn’t lead the story, that she should let the facts direct her instead of trying to fit every new discovery into some preordained, inflexible framework. If Strand were there, he would pull her reasoning apart and make it look easy, point out the obvious gaps in her logic and the assumptions underpinning her false surety. He isn’t, though, and he doesn’t know about the worst of Alex’s dreams. Besides that, Alex doesn’t want to have to count on anybody to keep herself grounded. She should be able to tell the difference between likely fact and self-reassuring fiction.

Either way, she finishes the coffee before it gets cold.

 

* * *

 

Nic is in the kitchen when Amalia kisses Alex, walks out of the living room and backs her up against the wall in the hallway next to the side table where Nic leaves his keys and the pile of shoes he always means to organize and all of their coats, hanging from a row of hooks, and there she presses her mouth to Alex’s, her beautiful laughing soft mouth, and Alex kisses her back.

Only for a moment, before she breaks away to catch her breath and remembers why they shouldn’t, but for long enough that Amalia is smiling when Alex meets her eyes. Another moment after that and she’s gone, into the kitchen to have some quiet conversation with Nic over the clatter of pots.

Alex presses her fingertips to her mouth. She feels as if Amalia has stolen her breath, left her unable to regain her composure, but worst of all she wants more; Alex wishes that she hadn’t stopped.

Nic looks up when she drifts into the kitchen, caught in Amalia’s wake. He furrows his brow. “Everything all right?”

Amalia is watching her, over his shoulder. Alex doesn’t know what the right answer is — whether Nic knows, if Amalia wants her to tell him, if Alex wants to anyway without her permission. “All good,” she says, and leans over the stove for something else to look at. “Anything I can do?”

There isn’t, so she removes herself to the living room and opens her laptop to make inroads into her email backlog, but she keeps remembering, seemingly at random, the press of Amalia’s mouth, the taste of her breath. Alex puts her laptop aside on the coffee table, pushing aside stacks of books to make room, and lies back on the sofa. She presses her hands over her eyes and tries to remember as thoroughly as possible the precise sensation of kissing Amalia, so that she can stop wondering whether she only imagined the rough edge to Amalia’s breathing, the faint tang of sage on her lips, the flick of her tongue over Alex’s lower lip. If Alex recalls it perfectly, transcribes it in her memory and leaves no space between lines, then maybe the thought will lose all its appeal.

Alex is still trying when Nic puts dinner on the table, and she keeps trying as she helps wash up, and at one in the morning — when she’s on the verge of giving up on sleep and going back to her inbox — she’s almost there, but not quite. She thinks that it might just be exhaustion, but then Amalia comes out of Nic’s bedroom, wearing only his shirt, and Alex realizes that none of it has helped at all.

She knows the look of intent in Amalia’s eyes, that projection of desire. Alex knows also that she could get up and leave, walk away from Amalia’s implicit offer, but more than that she wants to see how much Amalia wants her, so she pushes the blanket back and moves over, making room for her to sit. Amalia doesn’t, though. She rounds the coffee table and remains standing, bare feet crossed one over the other, and so it is Alex who reaches out, Alex who tugs Amalia into her lap, but finally Amalia who kisses her again, slow and thorough and sleep-warm under her hands.

“What about Nic,” Alex says, though she’s already pulling Amalia closer, hands climbing her sides, palms whispering against bare skin.

Amalia lifts her arms so Alex can pull her shirt off. “We talked.” She leans in for another kiss before Alex can ask for more — what she asked, what he said — and whispers: “It’s all right, Alexandra.”

 _Trust me_. Unspoken, the instruction hangs in the air between them nevertheless.

“I missed you,” Amalia says, leaning forward, and Alex closes her eyes. She leans in to mouth at the side of Amalia’s breast, biting where the weight falls, leaving a roseate mark she can see rising even in the half-light.

“I missed you too.”

Amalia laughs. “You missed me?” She throws her arms around Alex’s neck and tugs at the back of her shirt. “Or you missed this?”

“I missed you,” Alex says, and lets Amalia undress her, hands busy at Amalia’s hips, the insides of her thighs, all taut muscle and heat.

She still knows what Amalia likes, it turns out, how to make her almost vicious with pleasure. Amalia snarls against the top of Alex’s head, fingers tight in her hair, and only subsides when her thighs are shaking with aftershocks. She jerks against Alex’s hands and pants into her shoulder, gone heavy and lax with pleasure, and Alex licks the sweat from her throat.

Amalia slides to the floor and tugs Alex’s shorts down. Looking at her, Alex feels oddly weightless, chest tightening with a pang of something like wistfulness, but sharper, but Amalia’s smile is wicked and her mouth doubly so. Alex jams the heel of her hand into her mouth and thinks about what Nic would see if he walked in: her shirt rucked up to her shoulders so that Amalia can leave her bruised with fingerprints, her legs spread, her throat bared.

She tries to keep quiet, and suspects she isn’t doing as good a job as she might. Amalia would likely suggest that she wants to be overheard, but Alex isn’t so sure. She doesn’t know if this is how she wants it to happen, but with that uncertainty comes the realization that she does want, nevertheless — _God,_ Alex thinks, as Amalia smiles against her — and the shock of her own desire is what undoes her, leaves her shuddering through her core as she comes apart.

Because her newfound capacity for want is boundless and unstoppable, raging through her like a wildfire, Alex pulls Amalia up to kiss the taste of herself away.

Amalia pushes her back onto the sofa and pins Alex by the wrists, knowing it’ll make her squirm and arch up for more. She presses her leg between Alex’s thighs and murmurs, lips barely brushing hers: “Yes?”

“Yes,” Alex says, breathing her assent into Amalia’s mouth, “yes—”

 

* * *

 

It feels like a secret, one that Alex carries from the moment she wakes up, even though it shouldn’t, not if Amalia was telling the truth. Amalia kisses Nic in the kitchen and Alex doesn’t know whether to watch or look away. She sits in the passenger seat and looks sidelong at Nic, barely paying attention to the radio, and she wonders if Amalia does the same thing for Nic: if she holds him down, if she makes him laugh.

She manages to keep it up for a few hours of comfortable small talk and meaningless silence until Nic knocks on her desk. “Hey,” he says, and Alex looks up. “I’m going out for coffee, get you anything while I’m out?”

Nic doesn’t go out for coffee. He subsists on office brew, which doesn’t deserve the name, and brings enough packed lunch to feed a small army of interns. “Can we talk?” she says. “Just for a minute.” He nods, and she closes the door behind him and leans against it, leaving Nic to prop himself up on the desk. “Amalia said she talked to you.”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t fidget, which is how Alex knows he’s not sure how to respond and trying to hide it. “We — I mean, yeah, we — talked.”

“And it’s all right?”

The smile Nic gives her is genuine, though he looks as if he isn’t quite clear on why, but he also doesn’t sound like he’s lying when he says: “Yeah. It’s you. I know you, and I know Amalia, and — yeah. It’s all right.”

“Okay,” Alex says, because she had expected more equivocation, or at least more awkwardness, but of course Nic is just himself about it. Not to mention: _It’s you._ She likes the sound of that.

The thing about having a producer, especially a good one, is that Alex doesn’t remember how to curb her worst impulses. Most of the time, she has Nic to do it for her. Even though he would probably see nothing wrong with following a lead into a literal abbatoir, Nic always gets protective, bordering on paranoid, when it isn’t his own life at stake.

That goes a long way towards explaining why, when Alex bites her lip and rolls her head to the side, he goes as still and alert as if someone has him by the hair. For a moment in the bathroom that morning, Alex had wondered if she should dig around in her bag for concealer or find one of Nic’s less unfortunate scarves, but laziness and the temptation to revel in her debauchedness had won out. She knows what he’s looking at — the irregular marks spaced unevenly at the base of her throat, almost smudged into her skin, and bitten darker into the slope of muscle near her pulse — because she spent almost as much time staring at her reflection, getting reacquainted with her body as an object of pleasure. Alex knows that she’s easy to mark; Nic knew it too, firsthand, not so long ago. Now, he remembers.

Nic is the kind of still that means he’s paying very close attention. “That was Amalia?” he says finally, voice quiet but even.

“Yeah.” Alex tilts her head to give him a better view. She can’t tell whether he’s jealous of her or Amalia; if she had to put money on it, she would say both.

Nic lifts his hands from his lap, then folds them again. Alex wonders what he’s thinking and whether he wants to touch her, abruptly reminded of the dimensions of their relationship that went beyond the professional. “She said it might help, right? For you?”

“That’s not why,” Alex says, on reflex, but pauses. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it the exhaustion, the long hours, the need for something certain, something real? Maybe; maybe not. “But yeah, I think it did.”

Afterwards, she had drifted off in a sort of full-body glow, sated and sleepy in a way she hadn’t felt in so long that it seemed unfamiliar.

“Well,” Nic says. He keeps fiddling with his hands, rearranging them like paperwork. “I’m glad.” He gets up. “Guessing that isn’t a no to coffee, though.”

“No,” Alex says. “I mean, yes please. Or — oh, you know what I mean.”

“Okay,” Nic says, which means _yes_.

He pulls the door to behind him, and Alex taps a pen against her desk, thinking about something she’s afraid to look at too closely in case it slips away.

She calls out when she hears Amalia in the hallway, humming some unknown melody Alex almost thinks she should recognize. Amalia comes into her office and closes the door, leaning against it — as Alex had — and her eyes are bright and alive. “Hello,” she says.

Alex wonders for the first time precisely what Amalia said to Nic, to bypass his protective tendencies, his professional objections. “You said you talked to Nic,” she says, and realizes that what she really wants to know is what Nic said in return. “What did you say to him?”

“Oh, I don’t recall exactly,” Amalia says. She tilts her head. “Why the sudden curiosity?”

“I’m curious for a living.” Alex realizes that she’s twisting her hands in her lap, and stills them. She doesn’t have the skill to fake enthusiasm or detachment, beyond the minimum required to hold a workable conversation with the approximately five million people involved in producing an average segment. “I was just wondering.”

Amalia straightens, as if she can smell a break in the story, blood in the water. “And what were you wondering?” she says. “That question, what question does it lead to next?”

She has Alex there. No question stands on its own. Each one lays the groundwork for another, makes it easier to ask and have answered. Alex folds her hands and smooths over her composure as best she can, and says: “So, you and Nic — when you talked — what did he say to you?”

Amalia smiles.

 

* * *

 

Alex doesn’t remember, later, what Amalia tells her or what she asks in return. She doesn’t even remember most of what she said, not precisely, but she knows that she held her breath waiting for Amalia’s answer.

What she does recall is the way Amalia smiles when she says: “I wanted him to see.”

“He wanted to look,” Amalia says. Her voice is like velvet brushed the wrong way, all burr and beckon. “Did you want him to do more than that?”

Amalia and Alex don’t work together often. They simply exist in the same medium and breathe the same rarefied air, kept perpetually and terminally lightheaded by the thrill of the work and its demands. Alex remembers sitting in on a phoner Amalia did once, though, an interview with a politician whose name she had to look up afterwards. Amalia had done her background research and laid her groundwork, and Alex had barely noticed the net closing until — with deceptive casualness, and only the slightest hint of a smile — Amalia had drawn it tight.

At the time, Alex had hoped that one day she might be good enough to do the same, be lucky enough to find a story that deserved it. She had never considered what it might be like for Amalia to do the same to her, sinking the hook so easily that Alex only notices when she feels its tug.

“Yes, then?” Amalia says, and there it is, under her skin.

Alex nods.

Amalia gives her the kind of indulgent smile that makes Alex think she’s known all along and has just been waiting for Alex to say it. “All right,” she says, and leaves Alex alone again.

Alex doesn’t see her for the rest of the day, though she goes looking partway through the afternoon. When she glances into Nic’s office, he seems absorbed in something that looks a lot like Reddit. Alex goes back into her office and looks at her phone, which remains stubbornly dark. She wants to call Strand, and wishes she didn’t; she wants him to call her. She wants just one person in her life to be a certainty.

When Amalia meets them at the end of the day, she has a bag from a wine store in hand as she settles into the passenger seat. Alex sits in the back and bounces her leg until she realizes she’s doing it, and then she stares at the window and sees nothing that passes, and the car is full of that intent, that imminence of expression.

Nic opens the wine before dinner, on the pretext of cooking with it, while Amalia is in the shower. He pours a glass for Alex and then one for himself, and pauses for a long moment before he says: “So, Amalia says you talked to her.”

Alex looks into her glass. Said like that, it sounds like her initiative — which it was, but Alex is only realizing that for the first time because Amalia isn’t there to interpret, to act as a proxy between Alex and her want. “I did,” she says. “And she talked to you.”

He nods. “It feels like one long game of telephone in the office these days.” Alex snorts, and he smiles. “So. You’re all right?”

“If I say no, you’ll get all broody,” she says. “But I think so.” She doesn’t want him to worry, to feel like he has to pull her back from the edge, lead her away from the shadows that she’s hell-bent on peering into. It’s one thing for Nic to save Alex from herself on a professional level, but another entirely for him to play the same role in her personal life. It probably isn’t fair to either of them.

“Oh, well, now I have to get fussy,” he says. His vowels shift when he’s tired or stressed or too sincere to adjust the way he speaks. Judging by his smile, Alex doesn’t have to be worried. He raises his glass. “Cheers?”

Alex clinks hers against it. “Cheers,” she says, and drinks. After a moment’s thought, she sidles over to lean against him.

She still fits against Nic’s side, elbow strategically tucked against his ribs. Alex doesn’t look, but she thinks he’s smiling again.

By the time Amalia finishes in the bathroom, dinner is almost ready and Alex has pushed aside Nic’s drying rack — to his intense unhappiness — so that she can sit on the counter. Amalia steals Nic’s wineglass and leans next to her. “Smells good,” she says, and lifts her chin at Nic. “So. Go on.”

Alex isn’t sure who she’s talking to for a moment. Nic is busy with a dishcloth and a mismatched potholder. “Go on?” she says, but then Nic puts both down and moves to stand in front of her. “Oh.”

“Oh,” he agrees, hands brushing her knees. “Can I?”

She pretends to think about it, and manages to keep a straight face for about half a second. “Hmm. I don’t know,” Alex says, and tugs him closer with her heels hooked behind his legs. “God, Nic. Yes.”

“Thank you,” he says, as everyday and unremarkable as if she’d held a door for him, and rests his hands on her thighs, steady and present and warm. Alex leans forward, because she knows that if she does, Nic will kiss her. He does — tilts her chin up and gives her what she wants — and then he presses his mouth to her shoulder, her collarbone, the base of her throat. Where Amalia left bites, Nic leaves only brief pressure; Alex feels just as marked nevertheless.

She keeps her hands on the counter, giving him free rein, and in turn Nic gives her what she doesn’t know she needs. Alex turns her head to the side when he nudges, thumb at the hinge of her jaw, and sees Amalia watching them, wine glass to her lips. Her mouth is stained red. Alex wants to kiss it away, drink from her until they’re both dizzy.

Amalia smiles, setting the glass down, and steps away to turn off the stove. Nic presses his face into Alex’s shoulder, just for a moment, at the click of the knob, then he straightens and turns to shoo Amalia away and take out plates.

Alex watches them move around her and feels half-undone already.

 

* * *

 

Dinner feels normal, or at least makes Alex feel no more unmoored than usual, despite the wine and the warmth and their shifting, suspended boundaries. Maybe it’s all normal, and she’s just the one who doesn’t know what to make of it anymore. Either way, Nic evicts both of them from the room afterwards so he can clear and wash up — a longstanding tradition that still makes Alex feel vaguely guilty; one day she swears she’ll figure out how to beat him to the sink — and puts the radio on.

Terry Gross is wrapping up when Alex finishes her shower and comes out of the bathroom strategically wrapped in a towel, hair still damp. She catches Nic’s eye and smiles. “Oh, okay,” he says. “I see.”

She hums and pads into his bedroom. “See what?” On the bed behind her, Amalia snorts and tugs at the towel.

“That,” Nic says, as Amalia gains ground. Alex sits back, hoping to regain a little leverage, and lets her legs sprawl out, barely covered.

“What?” she says again, grinning, and Nic crosses his arms.

“Alex.”

She holds the towel to her chest. “Nicodemus.”

“Oh, come on,” he says, with an air of injured disapproval, and climbs onto the bed. Alex bites her lip and he raises an eyebrow; she beckons, and he sighs. “All right.”

Nic kisses her again, thoroughly, mouth sliding against hers in the kind of messy kiss enjoyable for its gracelessness as much as its heat. Alex takes full advantage, pressing up against him until he loses his balance and tumbles her backwards into Amalia’s lap. He tries to catch her, one hand at the back of her head, and only succeeds in going with her. Alex arches against him so that the towel slides down, and Nic gives her a look to say that he knows what she’s doing and is nevertheless unable to resist.

Amalia tangles her fingers in Alex’s hair, a gentle reminder that she is to share and be shared, and holds her in place as Nic reacquaints himself with what makes her shiver and what makes her moan; Alex is all too happy to do both.

By the time he stops kissing her, the towel is on the floor and Alex is doing her best to make short work of his clothes. Amalia isn’t helping, precisely, but Alex has the advantages of stubbornness and an encyclopedic knowledge of Nic’s sensitive spots. Unfortunately he knows hers just as well, which presents a much more significant hindrance. Getting Nic’s shirt off is an uphill battle with his mouth on her skin and Amalia tracing patterns on her throat, but Alex manages to strip him eventually, though by then her thoughts are splintered and refracted through pleasure, and she rests her hands against his ribs for a moment to feel him breathing.

Touching him doesn’t feel like coming home, exactly. Alex feels like a guest, being careful of the good china, or maybe that’s just how Nic is treating her. Maybe Amalia talked to him, pulled him aside and told him how she made Alex whimper, what she did. _Production notes_ , Alex thinks, flushing at the idea of them talking about her — about her like this — and then Amalia tugs her up to her knees for a kiss of her own.

Alex goes willingly, and doesn’t think about how difficult it’ll be to find her way back from this. For all that she’s managed it before, Alex knows that it’ll be even harder for her to intuit whether she’s too close to the line, whether she’s too close to the story; it just seems like a fair price for a week or so of relative stability. Alex wants to be taken care of, and she wants the easy temporary intimacy of waking up in somebody else’s bed. In the long run, it won’t help, but in the short run she can’t think of anything she wants more.

That impulsivity — Alex’s tendency to reorganize her priorities on short notice, often based solely on instinct — is why she has Nic, and why she probably shouldn’t be pulling him into this. On the other hand, maybe it’s precisely why he’s the right person to help, and of course it’s a little late for second thoughts.

“Alexandra,” Amalia says, and she breaks out of her reverie to Nic’s hands, warm on her hips, his teeth barely pressed into her shoulder.

“Yes?” She tilts her head back and catches his mouth for a moment, just enough to get the shape of his smile, a quick taste. Amalia turns her face back, fingertips against Alex’s jaw, and takes one of her own as Nic strokes down between her legs. It’s one thing to know how eager she is and another to feel the evidence of it in the way his fingers slip into her, easy and good. She bites her own lip and then Amalia’s, to make her laugh, and rocks forward onto Nic’s fingers, back against him. She can feel him hard against her and reaches back to slick her hand over the head of his cock, but he catches her by the wrist and she forgets how to breathe for a moment.

“Yeah,” Alex says, “could you just — hold my wrists, like — like that.” His grip is gentle but firm; Alex doesn’t have to test it to know. She feels heavier, safe, and lets out a breath that sounds more like a gasp.

It takes some rearrangement, but Alex is happy to let Amalia direct them until Nic is pressing into her, slow and sure until he’s sitting on the bed with Alex half-kneeling, half-splayed on his lap, leaning back against him. The way Amalia looks at Alex makes her feel like she’s on display, as does the way she runs her hands from Alex’s shoulders to her thighs. Judging by Nic’s laughter — exhalation at the nape of her neck, a thrum through her entire body — he thinks so too.

When he starts to move, hips rocking incremental and steady into her, Amalia digs her thumbs into the insides of Alex’s thighs, where the flexors are stretched taut with effort already. It aches where she presses, and Alex can feel the beginning of tremors in her legs and through her core when Amalia slips her fingertips into Alex where she’s wet and open, along the slide of Nic’s cock, and Alex wants more. She gasps for it, and Amalia gives her just enough to push her closer to the edge but not over it. Alex feels like an offering in the making, something to be spoiled and then spilled, blood or sacrament or both, and Amalia draws it out almost to the point of agony. By the time she sets to work in earnest to make Alex come, Alex isn’t sure if she can take it any longer, whether perpetual denial might not be kinder than whatever is next.

Of course, it wouldn’t be, but Alex isn’t thinking about that when she comes with nothing to hold onto, relying on Nic to be her rock and Amalia the wine-dark waves sweeping her away. She briefly registers a slight increase to the pressure of Nic’s grip on her wrists, and the way he jerks and tenses, then goes still. Beyond that, nothing: Alex goes under without a fight.

When she comes back to herself, Amalia is right there, with a smile that's all hunger and territory, and before Alex has the chance to do anything else, Amalia tips her chin up and steals her breath.

 

* * *

 

Alex registers, though not very clearly, a series of images: Amalia’s hand in Nic’s hair, and her legs open, one bent over his shoulder, and the other drawn up; her foot flexing against the sheets; the arch of her back; the edges of her teeth; her bruise-dark lips.

She curls against Amalia’s side and mouths at her skin, at the arch of her ribs, just to taste.

Amalia hums in pleasure, and Alex feels that through her entire body, too.

 

* * *

 

Before she sleeps, she makes Nic get her recorder. Alex isn’t quite back yet, still tangled in hazy pleasure and not in any particular rush to free herself, but some habits are too hard-won to break so easily.

He leaves it on the bedside table, next to a mug containing three pens and an engineer’s ruler, and smooths his hand over her hair before climbing in next to her.

Alex looks at the blinking zero on the screen — no recordings, not since she accepted his invitation, not since — and closes her eyes.

 

* * *

 

She wakes up to three.


End file.
